Do u listen to music while u work

most of the time

if i have to concentrate more than usual i'll play less obtrusive music like soothing ambient or mellow piano stuff

Hellllllll yes. I have to have at least one or two things going in addition to whatever I'm being paid to do or I'll lose my mind.

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My work music has always been in my head. Mostly dub, when it's not horrible pop Ohrwurms, which I eradicate by thinking of one of the following:

1. March of the Gladiators
2. Police and Thieves
3. The Price Is Right theme

All of which are more tolerable than whatever the coffee shop sound system inflicts on a thoughtful person.
I wish I could include the UFO theme in the above, but it's not on brain tape yet.

Shit yes. My boss who sits nearby talks to herself constantly, and needs to be screened out.

Mostly yes, 3 concentration levels:
Drone work like cropping and color correcting photos, or setting up blank pages to lay out later: loud and noisy is fine, songs with lyrics are fine, it's all good.
Medium concentration: drones, ambience, instrumental stuff, not a lot of tonal or dynamic jumping around.
Heavy concentration like deciphering "do the same thing as last year but add four pages to it": silence other than the sound of my teeth grinding.

About 10% of the time, when I have a dull task to do.

I used to not but I find myself extremely (and increasingly) easily distracted by small and seemingly ignorable-by-everyone-else noises so I resort to headphones as a sort of barrier (it doesn't work v well, but steady music with a full mid-range helps)

I do wonder what is different about my brain from a normal human brain that I am driven mad by normal everyday noises like foot-drumming, sniffing, throat-clearing, vigorous mouse-wheeling and mouse-clonking, while I can usually tune out the office chatterbox, who meanwhile drives everyone else mad but apparently they don't even notice the other stuff

possibly for the same brain-wiring reasons, I haven't really noticed vocals being distracting, but then the music I choose to put on is often either instrumental or at least not exactly mixed for vocal comprehensibility

I never used to be allowed, and always dreamed i could. Now i work for a commercial radio station, the kind that plays the same 10 songs in the mornings and afternoons, so the only way to block it out is to listen to my own music on headphones. it's great but yeah it can also be distracting.

I work with sound so most of the time I obviously can't but if I'm doing simple donkey work I much prefer to have some kind of background music.

If I'm writing emails or invoicing I have to listen to wordless music, an old work colleague who was a copywriter would have Cannibal Ox or somesuch plugged into his headphones while he was writing and brainstorming, I have no idea how he could do that.

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